Nokia & Blogging

Marketing Sherpa has published a fascinating Case Study titled: Nokia Tests Viral Marketing Via Bloggers to Launch New Phone. Nokia?s marketing people sought out bloggers to get samples of the 3650 camera phone. They were not asked to blog about the phone or to use the pictures on their blogs, only to take pictures with the phone and post them to Nokia?s micro-site. Well, guess what happened? They blogged about it, posted pictures on their blogs and sent traffic to the Nokia site -?several participating blogs were in the top 15 sites sending traffic to Nokia's microsite? says the Report.

I used to know the guys over at PC Mag's Labs down in NYC and was always envious of how many toys they had to play with. Hey, if you get a enough traffic to your blog, maybe you'll start getting free stuff to try and blog about!. You could be the next Walt Mossberg! Maybe my next blog will be about skiing or sports cars!

Nokia finds blogs to be an effective marketing & promotional vehicle for camera phone.

Belgians gets their own Photoblog site Photoblog.be - is in Beta with several hundred users. It is amazing how similar this site looks to Fotolog.net. This is one of the concerns when thinking about approaching someone for funding for a photoblog site - the barriers to entry are quite low and the noise level is increasing. I'll go back to my point from an earlier post today. EBay succeeded by providing a safe and reliable place for individuals to transact and because of this, they were able to grow their user base and reach critical mass. The good news was the more traffic they got, the more people transacted - generating revenue to fund development and infrastructure.

One thing that came out of Sunday morning's discussion at BloggerCon was that developing commercial software can be very expensive - so can building a robust online service. Some of these early photoblog services that do not have a viable business model may become victims of their own success. You know what they say about "pioneers" - they are often the ones laying on the ground dead with the arrows in their backs.

Great Photo Montage of Toronto Skyline

Toronto in 14 hours. Toronto in 14 hours, by Sam Javanrouh, who owns the number one Canadian photoblog: Daily Dose of Imagery [MetaFilter]

Photoblogs can be both an outlet for instantly publishing photos from a camera phone and a creative outlet for both "pro-sumer" amateur photo hobbyists as well as for professional photographers. Daily Dose of Imagery is a photoblog by Sam Javanrouh, a visual effects and graphics pro. The effects of compositing multiple frames from different times of day of Toronto from a stationary camera are really breathtaking. Make sure to check out the Quicktime movie of the entire sequence of shots. Photoblogs.com is a good resource for finding other photoblogs. They seem to have tightened up their requirements and cleaned out some of the dead wood.

TypePad Launches

TypePad launches. it's called TypePad, and it's a thing of beauty :) [anil dash's
daily links]

Though Anil can't be completely objective in regard to TypePad, the quote was actually from CNN/Buzz Factor! Type Pad is worth a serious look for a single web-based platform for both text and photo weblog publishing. These guys have really raised the bar in terms of providing a simple to use but elegant and extensible service for weblogs. Of particular interest are the photo features. TypePad allows the creation of Photo Albums as a stand-alone place to share photos in conjunction with your weblog. Photos can either be uploaded or emailed to an album. I wish there were better ways to include thumbnails from an album in a weblog post but I'm sure they will continue to evolve the product in subsequent versions. I know some will attack their decision to make TypePad a subscription service. Having lived through the last personal publishing revolution with free services trying to aggregate eyeballs for banner ads (remember Xoom.com or TheGlobe.com or homepage.com.....), subscription services are one of the only viable models to run this type of business.

Having a subscription-based services is a wise decision for several reasons:

1. if users are going to feel comfortable putting work and effort into building an online presence, they want to know that the service is going to be reliable and have the resources to continue to run and develop it. How many remeber the outrage from users a few years ago when PhotoPoint.com went under - some users had uploaded years of photos what went "poof", never to be recovered.
2. There is a very real opportunity for abuse on personal publishing services. Having a user base that has to give you a validated credit card is one way to try to keep a community "well lit". There is no guarantee that it won't happen, but is a high enough barrier that most people with bad motives will go elsewhere. This, I'm sure was the primary motivation in Microsoft's decision to close their forums only to subscribers.
   EBay has done a good job of creating a safe community for facilitating transactions between individuals. Do we need a similar "reputation-based" system for the exchange of information and ideas on the web between personal publishers?